As the weather gets nicer, I've noticed that time during class has started moving a lot slower. My 90-minute classes, which used to move at the normal pace of time, have suddenly stretched out to feel as if they're three hours long. Watching "Sunshine Cleaning" was like sitting in class knowing everyone else is lazing about on the grass in front of the art museum—excruciating.
"Sunshine Cleaning" focuses on the Lorkowski family. Rose (Amy Adams) was the popular cheerleader dating the quarterback in high school. Rose now works for a maid service in the same town where she grew up cleaning the houses of the people who used to want her life 10 years ago. A single mom, Rose struggles to balance her job, get her real estate license, and have an affair with the quarterback, who married another cheerleader. Add to the stress her sister Nora's (Emily Blunt) drug use, her father's get-rich-quick schemes, and her son's trouble in school, and it's easy to see why Rose is struggling.
When her son gets kicked out of school because he has been licking things, Rose decides that she needs to make a lot of money, fast, to pay for his tuition at a private school. The quarterback—now a police detective—tells Rose that she could make money cleaning up crime scenes. So, she and Nora start Sunshine Cleaning—a company that cleans up after suicides, deaths, and other bloody happenings.
In case you didn't understand what I was getting at when I opened this column, I'll say it explicitly here: the movie is dull. It's not even two hours long, but it felt like it was three. The writers tried to add in too many twists and turns, but the real originality came from the two women trying to clean up crime scenes. Instead of focusing on the humor there, the plot instead tries to become deeper by focusing on Nora's emotional baggage over her and Rose's mother's death and Rose's desire to make a life for herself that will allow her to feel some of the glory of her high school career. We watch Nora trying to connect with the daughter of a woman whose house she cleans after the woman dies, but instead of giving Nora (and us) some sort of catharsis, the movie just leaves everyone hanging. We see Rose trying to figure out her relationship with her lover, which never felt all that real anyway. We also have to watch Rose deal with her son, Oscar (Jason Spevack), who is too precocious to like; this is probably why it seems like Rose doesn't really like him.
The movie tries to elicit laughs about the pain of suicide by making us watch the women who have to clean up the messes left behind. In its attempt to do this, the movie tries to make Rose's and Nora's job uplifting by pretending that they're actually making a difference in people's lives. The only evidence I saw to support this point was one instance: when Rose sits with an old woman. Every other time, Nora and Rose clean up the bloodstains, get rid of the flies, and then skedaddle with their check. The movie was more of a documentary about cleaning up bio-hazardous waste than what it was supposed to be: a funny story about how messy life can be.
As the friend who went with me said, "The only uplifting thing in that movie was Amy Adams' curved nose." So unless you enjoy checking your watch every few minutes, find something better to do with your time—maybe get out and enjoy real sunshine?